Bridget Bate Tichenor - Life in Mexico

Life in Mexico

The cultures of Mesoamerica and her international background would influence the style and themes of Tichenor's work as a magic realist painter in Mexico. She was among a group of surrealist and magic realist female artists who came to live in Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her introduction to Mexico was through her friend and cousin Edward James, the British surrealist art collector and sponsor of the magazine Minotaure that was published in Paris. James lived in Las Pozas, San Luis Potosí, and his home in Mexico had an enormous surrealist sculpture garden with natural waterfalls, pools and surrealist sculptures in concrete. Tichenor had first met him in Paris in the 1930s. In 1947, James invited Bridget to visit him again at his home Xilitia, near Tampico in the rich Black Olmec culture of the Gulf Coast. Edward urged her for many years to receive secret spiritual initiations that he had undergone. Bridget's lifetime change and artistic direction came with her epiphanies that occurred on this trip. After visiting Mexico, Tichenor obtained a divorce in 1953 from her second husband, Jonathan Tichenor, and moved to Mexico in the same year, where she made her permanent home and lived for the rest of her life. She left her marriage and job as a professional fashion and accessories editor for Vogue behind and was now alongside expatriate painters such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon, and photographer Kati Horna.

Having lived in varied European and American cultures with multiple identities reflecting her life passages, Tichenor recognized the Pre-Columbian cycles of creation, destruction, and resurrection that echoed the events of the catastrophes of her own life mounted within the dismantling and reconstructive context of two World Wars. The openness of Mexico at that time fueled her personal expectations of a future filled with endless artistic inspiration in a truly new world founded upon metaphysics, where a movement of societal, political, and spiritual ideals were being immortalized in the arts.

At the time of Tichenor's move to Mexico in 1953, she began what would become a lifetime journey through her art and mysticism, inspired by her belief in ancestral spirits, to achieve self-realization. While painting alone and in isolation, she removed her familiar and societal masks to find her own personal human and spiritual identities; she would then reposition those hidden identities with new masks and characters in her paintings that represented her own sacred beliefs and truths. This guarded internal process of self-discovery and fulfillment was allegorically portrayed with a cast of mythological characters engaged in magical settings. She painted a dramatization of her own life and quests on canvas through an expressive visual language and an artistic vocabulary that she kept secret.

In 1958, she participated in the First Salon of Women's Art at the Galerías Excelsior of Mexico, together with Carrington, Rahon, Varo, and other contemporary women painters of her era. That same year, she bought the Contembo ranch near the remote village of Ario de Rosales, Michoacán where she painted reclusively with her extensive menagerie of pets until 1978.

Tichenor counted painters Carrington, Alan Glass, and artist Pedro Friedeberg among her closest friends and artistic contemporaries in Mexico. In 1971, Friedeberg introduced his friend and former apprentice, American artist and spiritist Zachary Selig, to Tichenor in Mexico City. She spiritually adopted Selig as her protégé and became his mentor until her death in 1990. In 1978, Selig introduced Tichenor to fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo who photographed her portrait.

Between 1982 and 1984, Tichenor lived in Rome and painted a series of paintings titled Masks, Spiritual Guides, and Dual Deities. Her final years were spent at her home in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.